You Change Your Position and You Are Changing Me
by zombie josette
Summary: Victoria became something different to him, more than a drowning slip of a girl wild with the cold, but more of a relic. An old figure of the house that was untouchable. Quentin/Victoria.


Quentin could remember the exact details of the day he saw her. An otherwise unremarkable day that was suddenly turned round by her arrival. A Thursday in mid-April. The eleventh. It was raining - torrents falling from the sky. It was late-afternoon - 4:41 PM, to be exact.

She was sitting on the sofa shivering and soaking wet and muttering and everyone was _fawning_ over her. Caring for her, trying to coax more coherent words from her. Quentin couldn't get too near her for the commotion, though he didn't know why that was. She was just a girl. He stood back and observed her and then she looked at him. An unfamiliar face. A stranger where she would feel safe, but an instant understanding between them. She would share, yes, but not right _now_ could they _please_ just leave her _alone_ -

And Quentin listened.

Nearly a couple of weeks passed and Vicki - though Quentin liked to call her Victoria; it suited her more, in his opinon - became well and settled into the house with little difficulty, though answering Julia's and Elizabeth's and Carolyn's concerned questions as vaguely as possible. She used to live here, she told him one day, and Quentin realized he was speaking to the governess he'd heard mentioned. The one who disappeared. The one with no past - the one who might as well have never existed.

It was the twenty-first of April when Victoria told him this and looked at him with her wide, inquiring eyes and Quentin said nothing. It was when things changed. It was when Victoria became something different to him, more than a drowning slip of a girl wild with the cold, but more of a relic. An old figure of the house that was untouchable. An old remnant of the house that followed his every move and could read him like an open book. An open book with magnified print, Quentin thought bitterly. Humorlessly.

And Quentin didn't know how to react around the woman for once in his life.

Another week passed. Victoria began to reveal more, but there was a strange shift in the tides. Hallie came storming into his room one evening, and when asked what was wrong, he was greeted only with a shrill, "She's crazy!"

A beat. Quentin didn't even have to ask, and before he could stop himself, he defensively responded, "Don't talk like that about Victoria. She's ill."

"_You're_ just sticking up for her because you're _grown-ups._ You should have heard what she told me!"

"What did she tell you?" was out of Quentin's mouth, again, before he could stop himself. It was no use trying to deny that he was curious.

Hallie's face turned steely. "That she went through _time._ Can you imagine?"

Quentin didn't say anything. Funny how an explanation that seemed so ridiculous in normal circumstances could explain so much to him.

"I don't think that's something you need to worry about," he told Hallie after a moment. "Now go on. Off to bed."

Hallie listened to him. Hallie always did. He was good with children. But when one visitor left, another took her place, and Quentin wasn't sure what to do when Victoria showed up at his door. Luckily, she solved that with a sweet, smooth, "May I come in?"

He let her. And then it was quiet. A strange sort of silence that Quentin wasn't used to until, again, she was the one to break it with, "I saw Hallie leaving and I wondered if I oughtn't explain things for myself."

And she did. And Hallie had told him the truth. And Hallie might have been right, maybe Victoria _was_ crazy, but all Quentin could notice was the way her eyes never left his, how sometimes she would smile shyly, _genuinely._ How she seemed to trust him with this and he didn't know why, but he wasn't going to ask questions - by now he could tell that Victoria just _knew_ things about people, like the way she knew her way knew her way through the centuries. It came naturally to her.

When she had finished, she hesitated and said, "I don't expect you to believe me."

"I believe you," he said, without any hesitation whatsoever as he looked at her with as much sincerity as he was capable of. A new feeling for him. "Does anyone else know?"

"Barnabas and Julia. And the children."

Quentin wouldn't say perhaps she was wrong to tell the children. Wouldn't question her motives. He had no right; it was a strange respect for a strange authority that came about in a strange way.

It was the twenty-seventh of April when Victoria told him the truth, and just after midnight on the twenty-eighth when Quentin bit her goodnight.

The turning point came one early evening when no one expected. No one knew how or why or when, but so suddenly, Barnabas' bloodlust returned. It returned with a vengeance and it sent Victoria screaming and sprinting through the woods and straight into Quentin's unexpecting arms on the terrace. His questions fell on deaf ears as she trembled against him and after the sixth or seventh or twelfth he gave up on asking. As it so often did, silence hung between them except for her gasps until she finally asked - pleaded - with him to go inside.

She locked the door and couldn't keep herself from gazing out the window and paced and after five or eight more questions, she finally told him. Barnabas. His eyes, the fangs and - maybe he could help.

Did she ask him to help? Did she honestly think he could help?

She had been truthful with him, Quentin remembered, he had no right to keep the truth from her. And in his typical, idiotic, impulsive fashion, his truth spilled from his mouth before he could stop it. Everything: the moon, the wolf, the portrait.

Victoria fell perfectly silent. No more sobs, no more trying to catch her breath. She stared at him with those wide eyes as she had a million times before.

And then, without a word, she left.

It was the ninth of May when Victoria came to him for help, and he pushed her away unwittingly. It was like she had been drawing it out of him the whole time, but the reaction wasn't what he had expected. Not what he had wanted.

They didn't speak for a while. She stopped her curious gazes. Quentin wondered if she knew the tension she created, what she had done to him, if she did it to anyone else. It couldn't be like that, he thought, she could read people, could know their differences, there was no way she would treat everyone the same.

Quentin tried to stop thinking of her when she began to talk about leaving. She wasn't needed here, she said, she would rather be out of the way. It would be easier than anything else.

Quentin found her in the drawing room, partly by accident, and she didn't turn away from him. There was something different about her, things Quentin rarely noticed about people. Her stance, her posture, like she was alert and ready and waiting. For a moment, he thought perhaps she was waiting for him, but it was something different - a wanderlust that was familiar to him.

"I wish you wouldn't leave," Quentin tried, though he knew that once one took on that attitude, it was hard to break.

She looked at him and she smiled. She actually smiled, one of the shy ones he remembered so well. "I don't know where yet. You could help me decide."

He noticed her fingers drumming a history book, and then everything seemed right again. He understood.

They flipped through the pages together, mumbling comments where they were due and flipping away when they weren't, and then Victoria mentioned her fondness for the Edwardian era and then it was done. He wanted to protest again, wanted to keep her there, somehow, but he was rendered speechless - another new sensation she'd brought upon him. He'd lost count of which number it was.

And then Victoria looked at him again. Looked at him the way she used to. The understanding he - they - felt before they'd even properly met, he remembered it. It increased. There weren't any words needed, really, Victoria could see right through him, and Quentin was getting better at predicting her responses.

It was the thirtieth of May when Victoria offered Quentin her hand in invitation, and Quentin accepted.


End file.
